From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:

Alma and I are in Ross. We are at Aunt Hermine’s house. Aunt Hermine invited me because she thought it would be good for my tonsils, even if I haven’t them any more. This is because Ross is warmer than San Francisco.

Aunt Hermine is a sweet lady even if she is Tante Esther’s daughter, and everything here smells so lovely, like perfume and honey mixed. Tante Esther is also here but I don’t have to see her much. Her maid is always taking her on little walks or reading to her in her own room.

It is so warm and lazy and quiet here and there are so many lovely places to take walks. There is one road named Shady Lane with a gray stone church, just like the one in “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” All afternoon, I can lie in a hammock and read. Aunt Josie sent me a wonderful book while I was in the hospital. It is called “Girls Who Became Famous.” Florence Nightingale is in it, also a girl named Rosa Bonheur who was French and painted horses and cows and loved to travel around France from one country fair to another and a girl named Louisa May Alcott. She was an American and her father was a very famous teacher and she was terribly smart too and she wrote books. Her first book is called “Little Women.” And there was another girl called Margaret Fuller Ossoli and she wrote poems. She went to Italy and married Mr. Ossoli, only he wasn’t really her husband, she just said he was, and that is the only thing she did that wasn’t quite nice. They were both drowned on a ship that sank while they were returning to America. I think George Eliot did the same thing, not drown but say she was married when she wasn’t. 

“Lives of Girls Who Became Famous” by Sarah Knowles Bolton was first published in 1886 and can be read online through Project Gutenberg.

Hilda is enjoying herself at Aunt Hermine’s and will return on September 4.